A spatial calibration method for master-slave surveillance system

The master-slave surveillance system uses stationary-dynamic camera assemblies to achieve wide-area surveillance and selective focus-of-interest. In such a system, a stationary fish-eye camera monitors a panoramic field of environment from a distance, while a dynamic PTZ (Pan–Tilt–Zoom) dome camera is commanded to acquire high-resolution images from a focused direction and provide multi-scale zoomed-in information. In order to achieve the precise interaction, pre-processing spatial calibration between these two cameras is required. This paper introduces a novel vision based calibration approach to automatically calculate a transformation matrix model between the fish-eye coordinate system and the PTZ dome coordinate system by matching feature points in the scene. The experiment has demonstrated the effectiveness of using this method with high accuracy in short calibration time.